Crescent — Finance app making high-yield interest accessible to all

Website

https://www.crescent.app/

Type

Investment App

Crescent is a finance app making high-yield interest accessible to all. The platform offers users 100x higher interest rates compared to traditional savings accounts with up to 6% APY, no minimums and no hidden fees. Users can increase their interest by activating boosts and support the causes they care about with an inbuilt Social Impact feature.

Crescent is crypto-powered: users' deposits are instantly converted to US Dollar Coin (USDC). 1 USDC = $1 Dollar. The app builds on top of USDC technology which enables higher interest rates, faster transfers, and no fees.

Services

Front-end
Back-end
Design

Our challenge

Crescent came to 10Clouds for support with building the frontend of its app, complete with UX and product design.

The initial product was intended to be a crypto-investing platform for beginners, but it later pivoted to become a high yield savings tool powered by crypto. While the average high yield offer in the States stands at around 0.5%, Crescent is able to offer 6%.

The company’s decision to pivot was mainly due to the regulatory environment changing in the US, but Crescent is still planning to launch the investment part of its product as it scales.

FrontEnd

We started our work with Crescent over a year and a half ago. For more than a year we were fully responsible for developing the mobile application from the ground up. Now we are working with the Crescent mobile team on its redesign and the delivery of new features. The team is spread between Poland and the USA, which sometimes makes our collaboration tricky, but we’ve managed to meet this challenge head on.

The whole mobile team consists of 4-5 developers which makes Crescent one the biggest mobile projects at 10Clouds.

From a technical perspective the app is being developed in Flutter with a focus on iOS. We have a few integrations with third party services including Firebase, Auth0, Google Places, Plaid and recently Segment. The communication with the backend is handled by GraphQL. As a state management we decided to use Redux.

We started by implementing the user onboarding and buying and selling cryptocurrencies flows. Then we moved to the Portfolio representing a user’s wallet and the rules which allow users to save regularly. After a redesign we reimplemented the onboarding making it more user-friendly.

Frontend of the Crescent app

App features

We developed a mobile app for Crescent with three core functionalities:

1. Boosts — enable users to temporarily increase their account APY by performing simple challenges. The more challenging the boost, the more APY users earn for themselves.

2. Scheduled Investments — users can set up recurring investments on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis.

3. Round-up — users can link spending accounts (credit, debit, Paypal, etc.), and then automatically the spare change will be round-up from every transaction.

4. Social Impact — users can direct a percentage of Crescent’s earnings to one of a handful of nonprofits for free. Crescent encourages and supports not only great savings habits but also allows users to make a positive impact in the world.


A feature of the Crescent mobile app

Design

The scope of design work was very broad and challenging. The Crescent team had previously cooperated with many designers, and the work that we were doing was initially based on these design projects. But when the planned change in project direction occurred, Crescent decided that they wanted to start afresh with a new design.

Our team of product designers worked simultaneously on the development of new features to accommodate the product pivot as well as designing a new visual style, and design system.

As part of this process, we created a basic brand style, and developed a fully fledged set of guidelines, which included custom made typography for the font, 2D/3D animated sigil and a range of 3D illustrations. The process of brand creation was completed in parallel to the process of designing the product landing page.

The challenge here was to coordinate the work of brand design, illustration, motion design, webflow development and product design in order to create a cohesive brand experience that fits the detailed target audience description and tone of voice provided by the client.

Various designs of the Crescent mobile app including the logo on different backgrounds

Collaboration

The collaboration between the 10Clouds team and Crescent has always been dynamic, with two teams working in tandem and progressing towards common goals. The 10Clouds team is composed of Flutter developers, QA testers, product designers, illustrators and product delivery managers. We always follow an agile approach in our work, adjusting and embracing changes.

One example of this was the pivot that occurred during the branding concept. Even though the deadlines were strict, we changed direction a few times in the exploration phase, working closely with Crescent. This resulted in outstanding branding and an impressive landing page which showcases the real value of the product to users.

We worked in iterations with as many touchpoints with the Crescent team as possible, which ensured that we were always on the same page and minimized wasted effort.

The Crescent Mobile App home screen and calculator

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